JOURNEY TO LHASA

In the late nineteenth century, the British colonial government sent Sarat Chandra Das, a Bengali schoolteacher and amateur scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, to Lhasa on two long reconnaissance missions. While disguised as a monk, he was to explore the kingdom on foot and map the region for the colonial state. His own motives and sympathies, however, were more complex, as is evident from this diary of his trips to Tibet.